Last year’s races at Las Vegas featured a Chip Ganassi Racing team sweep with defending winner of Saturday’s Boyd Gaming 300 (at 4 p.m. ET on FS1, PRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) Kyle Larson and Ross Chastain. While the team isn’t competing this weekend, Chastain will be on track in the No. 4 Chevrolet for JD Motorsports.
Back atop the championship standings, as he was so much of last year, is Joe Gibbs Racing driver Christopher Bell, who holds a slim four-point edge over Brandon Jones entering the race.
As with Larson and Chastain last year – who led 142 and 180 laps respectively in their Las Vegas victories – the race winners, specifically, have recently proven themselves the class of the field. You have to go all the way back to Ricky Stenhouse Jr.’s win in 2012 – when he led 55 laps- to find a race winner that didn’t lead at least 100 laps.
The only previous winners entered this weekend include Chastain, and fellow Cup regulars Austin Dillon (2013) and Kyle Busch (2016), who is competing in all three series races at his hometown track.
Source: Holly Cain | NASCAR Wire Service
